In the processing of customer deposits by a bank, a balancing or reconciliation operation is performed to verify that the total deposit amount submitted by the depositor is the actual amount received by the bank. In banking terms, the balancing process "proves" that the credits (the total of the items in the deposit as determined by the depositor) are equal to the debits (the deposit total as determined by the bank).
Errors which the balancing process detects and corrects include depositor errors and system errors. Depositor errors include, for example, those where the amounts deposited are added incorrectly, a check is listed erroneously, a check included in the deposit but is not listed on the deposit slip, or, a check which is listed on the deposit slip is not enclosed. System errors include those where the system has incorrectly read an amount, an operator has incorrectly keyed an amount, checks are stuck together such that one is not read by the system, or where a check is missing from one deposit and included in another.
This balancing process has been conventionally carried out in a manual or semi-automated manner by balancing clerks with the assistance of business machines or computers. For example, the clerk may use a business machine to tally individual check amounts and balance to the total deposit amount as the operator is manually keying and encoding the amounts from the checks. Another balancing procedure, employed in the IBM 3895 system, utilizes a computer terminal to assist in the balancing operation. Checks and associated deposit slips are encoded with the corresponding amount and read into a computer. These documents are sorted and placed in various pockets of document trays for processing. The clerk, while sitting at a computer terminal, brings up lines of data on the screen relating to the document data stored in memory. If a balancing discrepancy occurs, the clerk then searches through the individual documents located in a pocket of a tray to locate the particular document in question, removes the document from the tray, enters the corrected amount from the check into the computer replacing the incorrect amount on the screen, and reinserts the document into its proper location in the document tray. Through this process, the balancing clerk is able to determine the cause of each out-of-balance condition and can correct the discrepancy via the computer terminal to achieve a balance state for each deposit until all out-of-balance conditions have been reconciled.
With the development of image processing technology and computers capable of handling image data as well as numerical data, it has been proposed by others that the images of documents be used during various document processing operations rather than the actual documents themselves in order to reduce the need for physically handling large numbers of documents. For example, Burns et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,205,780 describes a document processing system wherein the images of documents are presented to an operator, who reads the document image and key enters the appropriate amount. Burns et al. suggest that the image processing system may be used for various purposes including initial encoding, capture and balancing of batches of checks. However, no method or apparatus disclosed by which balancing of deposits would be achieved. Owens et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,808 also discloses a document processing system wherein electronic images of the documents are captured and used during various document processing steps in lieu of the actual physical documents. However, according to the Owens et al. disclosure, the balancing operation relies upon printed reports and the associated physical documents.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,813,077 to Woods et al. provides a system and method for processing of sales transaction records which includes a form of image balancing. The Woods et al. image balancing routine provides simultaneous display of an image taken from a transaction document and the amount attributed to that image as internally stored in the record for the document associated with that image. Adjustments can be made by the operator to correct inaccuracies. However, a very significant limitation of the Woods et al. balancing procedure is that it can only correct for system errors, such as those arising from the incorrect coding of the amount of a document. The balancing procedure does not address how to deal with other types of errors, such as depositor errors, as may occur for example due to an addition error in the deposit total or a discrepancy between the items listed on a deposit slip and the items actually included with a deposit.